Start the year fresh.
You’ve just concluded a leisurely summer of working
happily on your dissertation and spending relaxing weekends at your parents’
lake house. This is what life is all about, you tell yourself. This is
what you’ve always wanted . . . to finally focus on your writing!
But it’s clear that things are suddenly different.
Your dissertation fellowship is not renewed—probably because you told
the head of the committee that the idea of requiring fellows to do a presentation
on their work every month was complete bullshit.
But that’s okay.
You stand by your words and prepare to teach for the first
time in fifteen months. You decide to teach a new lit course, not because
you don’t want to teach creative writing, but because you think it
would be good to add another line to your C.V. You’re given your class
assignment two weeks before the term begins, order the books a week later,
and don’t finish putting the syllabus together until three in the
morning the night before classes start, adding a little bit of Tupac to
the poetry unit just to piss off the powers-that-be.
Because you’re still technically only a graduate
student even though you’re A.B.D.,—All But Dissertation or Deceased,
whichever comes first—you get the eight o’clock class that meets
three times a week, but you tell yourself that’s okay too because
you’ll be able to hit the gym afterwards and make it home by noon
with plenty of time left to work on the dissertation. That is, right after
you finish the prospectus you were supposed to have completed before you
sat for your comprehensive exams ten months ago.
The prospectus should be easy. After all, it’s not
like you’re writing a real dissertation. For God’s sake,
this is just a creative dissertation. And besides, it’s all
about you and what you’re writing, and, like most people, you love
talking about you. But instead of being easy, you find it’s very difficult
because you and what you’re writing about isn’t really that interesting
at all—in fact, you’re not even sure why you’re writing
what you’re writing, much less if there are any themes or ideas around
which you can unite the collection—so you crib as much as you can
from the prospecti of those who came before you and hope you’ve created
a document no one will care much about, especially since it’s not
one you care about at all.
This turns out to be an epic waste of time because when
you finally turn in a first draft a month later and meet with your dissertation
director, he—because they are always a “he”—says it
needs to be a document that animates your committee and that you shouldn’t
have looked at any one else’s because no one has ever done it right
before. You laugh—because what choice do you have?—and ask in
your most scholarly voice what you should do to fix it. Your dissertation
director tells you to scrap the whole thing and start again. In as oblique
a way as possible, he instructs you to talk about why you’re writing
what you are writing and who has influenced you.
So you start with who has influenced you and go from there.
There must be some reason you like the writers you do.
But despite the fact that you’ve been talking about this issue for
the last seven years (two while doing the Master’s degree and five
in the doctoral program), you’ve never really thought about
this before—you just like what you like, and you can’t explain
why. Much like your students.